The FAFSA won’t be available until Oct. 1 but in the meantime you can download the EFC Formula Guide for the current year and calculate your Expected Family Contribution.
This year’s FAFSA EFC formula includes nominal inflation-related adjustments to the Income Protection Allowance, Adjusted Net Worth of a Business or Farm, and Assessment Rates and, for the first time in many years, actually increases the Asset Protection Allowance, though not by a meaningful amount. More details on the FAFSA’s components are here.
The big question for many families this year is: How do I show on the FAFSA that my income has changed since the 2019 tax year that they’re using? Two possibilities:
- Any parent who has lost their job should check the “Dislocated Worker” box. The FAFSA also has checkboxes for families receiving TANF, Medicaid, SNAP, Free or Reduced Lunch or WIC.
- Since the FAFSA– unlike the CSS Profile– does not have an open-ended field to describe any changes in the family’s circumstances, families may need to go through the Professional Judgement (PJ) process after receiving acceptances and financial aid offers to present their updated circumstances.
Unfortunately, the Department of Education says that families must fill out the FAFSA “as is” and then appeal their award: “Complete the FAFSA questions as instructed on the application (including the transfer of tax return and income information), submit your FAFSA form, then contact the school you plan to attend to discuss how your current financial situation has changed. Note that the school’s decision is final and cannot be appealed to ED.”
Families often ask whether their student can file as independent and thus not be required to report parent income and assets. “Independent” has a variety of requirements, depending on the topic, and those for the FAFSA are quite onerous for undergraduates. The easiest one might be that the student was born before Jan. 1, 1998. The full list of qualifying criteria is on page 3 of the Formula Guide.
Got all that? Here’s the 2021-2022 EFC Formula Guide.
There are 17 comments
Hi,
I just finished filing FAFSA for 2021-2022 for 3 kids that will be in college. However I received higher EFC score then last year(2020-2021) with 2 kids in college from 15000+ to 47000+ this year with 3 kids. This doesn’t make sense as my expectation was to receive lower EFC score with more kids in college.
There has not been any changes to our family income/finance and I have compared last year’s form and this year’s form printout to ensure we entered the correct info and they are very much a like except to an additional child in college.
Thanks in advance for any info that will make sense of this.
Hmmm. That doesn’t make sense. The only thing I can think of is (since $47,000 is so close to 3x$15,000) did you perhaps only include all the students in family size and not in “how many college students”?
Hi, Thanks for your quick reply.
Yes, I have 5 kids and family size = 7 and college students = 3.
Also I was on chat with Fafsa support and she confirmed that $47K is only for one college kid.
I was able to ask the FAfSa support to read off all the numbers they had in the EFC calculations so I could compare to the worksheet I was using. It was helpful, although did not explain everything. I could at least get more info that the SAR.
Ok, I am hitting a high EFC also. I have been calling all their numbers. Finally got a person who told me all the numbers that they can see on their screen. AAI and all the goods. Still can’t find out why it is double than what I thought it was. Any thoughts? Also, in the Allowances against Parents income section, Are they still using Income tax paid as well as Social Security tax allowances? Our numbers are NOT adding up with the FAFSA. I keep getting the run around like the computer than runs these things is never wrong or something.
I’m not sure what your data says so I can’t say for sure but a couple of things come to mind: Is it possible that you have multiple college students but you didn’t answer the question about the number in college correctly? Alteratively, did you do a 401k or IRA rollover that’s showing up on your tax return? And yes, it is actual income taxes paid + allowance for Social Security tax. I’m sorry this process is so frustrating!
I have four kids. This next year my first will go to college. So one kid. In college in a family of 6. I took out about 5k from ira last year. That seems to be fine. It’s the allowances section that is skewed. They are calculating around 50k and I am getting 63k. They don’t seem to be using income tax paid OR SS tax on income 7.65%.
Hmmm. The numbers used in the formula are your actual federal tax liability and calculated allowances on state and FICA. So in many cases people who get a federal refund end up with a higher EFC than expected– though by now that should have evened itself out.
Hi,
I actually used the manual worksheet downloaded from the site and the EFC number came out to ’12K’ with 3 kids in college as last year with 2 kids were around ’15K’. At least it went down. I tried to call and didn’t get to talk to anyone because I got into end less loop of system. Can you share the number you called perhaps I call different number?
1‑800-4FED‑AID
(1‑800-433‑3243)
All contact options are here
Hi,
I too, got an astronomical EFC. More than twice than our annual income. I think a decimal is out of place or an extra zero was added. Called the FAFSA number and because I used the IRS retrieval tool, they can’t help me. I have to call each school’s financial aid office and have them look into it. Have you heard of this before?
Thanks for your help.
That is unfortunate but yes, if the info is coming from the IRS there’s nothing the FAFSA help line can do about it. It’s not all that unusual; in fact, a friend of mine had a similar experience. In her case, she had done an IRA rollover that the IRS DRT showed as income. You’ll want to reach out to schools sooner rather than later to correct it because chances are you’ll be asked for additional documentation such as a tax transcript.
I just looked at my taxes. I bet that’s what happened. I rolled over an IRA. UGH!!!
Good news: that’s an easy fix! But you will need to fix it with each school.
Thank you very much!
Could it be the fafsa with IRS Dara tool is automatically answering the schedule 1 as yes instead of no for exceptions and creating higher EFC’s?
Maybe but what the question is trying to get at is whether the person is eligible for the simplified formula. The rules for that changed when the TCJA tax form came into being in 2018 and that complicated things for the simplified formula. All the Schedule 1 info is on the 1040.